Computing systems are providing ever more complex and sophisticated functionality. Such functionality is often primarily driven by underlying software, which itself is becoming ever more complex. Application developers have the task of developing such software, and to tune performance to ensure efficient operation. Such application developers and other entities might also be interested in evaluating software performance.
Application developers have a wide variety of tools at their disposal in order to author software. First, source code allows the application developer to author software using instructions that are more understandable and intuitive to a human than is binary or intermediate code. The source code is ultimately compiled and/or interpreted into binary to allow readability of the code by a computing processor. In addition, various authoring tools allow for various visualizations that allow a developer to have a good understanding of how the application is currently functioning. For instance, some authoring tools allow a programmer to step through the execution of a program, one line of source code at a time, and evaluate the values associated to various parameters and variables. Authors might also insert temporary lines of code with the design for use in debugging. Other profiling tools give a sense for what percentage of the time the program takes performing particular operations.